Professor sues MU over harm to reputation

Janese Silvey

Tuesday

Jan 31, 2012 at 12:01 AMJan 31, 2012 at 1:00 PM

Greg Engel isn’t waiting to see whether the University of Missouri ultimately clears him of wrongdoing: He thinks administrators already have damaged his reputation and career, and he wants them to pay.

Engel, an associate engineering professor, filed a lawsuit against the UM Board of Curators and several College of Engineering administrators Friday in Boone County Circuit Court. He is seeking $5 million in punitive damages from the administrators for allegedly denying him due process and breaching contractual agreements.

The lawsuit sums up Engel’s rocky relationship with his employer over the past two years, during which he has been removed as lead of a research project, accused of discrimination and kicked out of the classroom. He is the target of pending faculty irresponsibility charges aimed to get his tenure status revoked.

The college’s actions have taken a toll, the petition says, blaming administrators for causing Engel lost income, mental anguish and embarrassment.

Engel’s troubles started in early 2010 when College of Engineering administrators accused him of not fulfilling duties related to a $2 million federal earmark he had secured to conduct research on electromagnetic launchers — an accusation Engel denies.

In May 2010, engineering Dean James Thompson and Engel’s chair, Noah Manring, displaced Engel as project lead and gave the position to Annie Sobel. Sobel is an adjunct professor who works in the provost’s office and also is the wife of Rob Duncan, MU’s vice chancellor of research.

Later that year, Engel’s teaching duties were suspended after students complained he discriminated against them. Three female Chinese students accused him of racial and gender discrimination when he gave them zero grades on an assignment they allegedly plagiarized, and a fourth female student also accused him of gender discrimination when he lodged a complaint against her for disruptive behavior in class.

The lawsuit accuses Manring and associate engineering Professor Scott Kovaleski of conspiring with students to lodge those complaints in retaliation after Engel went public with concerns about losing his research status. The students have publicly denied that.

Last month, a student grievance committee cleared Engel of wrongdoing, with members unanimously voting they found no evidence of gender or racial discrimination in either case. However, the committee said Engel should have better clarified his expectations, and members recommended he write apology letters to the Chinese students. Provost Brian Foster concurred with the findings, asking Engel to also write a letter to the fourth student. Engel has since written those apology letters.

A faculty committee also cleared Engel of accusations of irresponsibility, although that process is awaiting a final decision from Chancellor Brady Deaton.

Early last year, Kovaleski and other engineering faculty filed faculty irresponsibility charges against Engel accusing him of being disrespectful to students and not being an effective teacher.

The committee — made up of non-engineering faculty — voted 4-3 this month that the evidence to support those claims wasn’t sufficiently “clear and convincing.” In their report, committee members said administrators seriously overreacted when they suspended him of teaching duties, and members recommended Engel be immediately reinstated to the classroom.

Foster is challenging the report, though, saying in a letter to Deaton that “clear and convincing” is too high a standard to put on the evidence. Instead, he calls for the use of “preponderance of evidence,” which would require decision makers to determine whether Engel’s accusers have shown their version of facts is more likely than not to be the correct version.

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